


Kogi

by Bitterblue



Series: Daemons and Demons [3]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, cw for racism and homophobia, only the tiniest hint of Sanvers but...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-11 11:44:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8978323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bitterblue/pseuds/Bitterblue
Summary: Part 3 of the HDM au. Maggie and Kogi growing up in Nebraska.





	

The first time Maggie realizes she's different in a fundamental kind of way, she's six years old and rushing outside with Kogi at recess. It's one of the first warm days of spring, and Kogi shifts between a small, brown bunny, and a much larger, brown puppy as they race into a patch of sunlight. A couple of girls reach the monkey bars before her, their daemons turning into monkeys along with them as they scrabble up and across the play equipment.

"Hey!" The girls look at her, noses wrinkling. Their hair is spun sunshine gold in this light, their daemons gold to match, and their eyes are as blue as the sky. Blue and cold. "Can I play, too?"

The girls share a look Maggie doesn't understand, and frown. "No. You're dirty."

Kogi steps closer to her so she can rest her fingers in the soft fur at the base of his neck. "What? No! I take baths!"

The girls giggle, and one of them shakes her head. "No, like, your skin. It's dark like you got dirt on it." Maggie doesn't know what to do with _that_ , but she won't cry in front of these mean girls. (She finds a tree with lowish branches and the first flourish of spring leaves to hide behind, and only reluctantly goes back inside when the bell rings.)

 

* * *

 

Blue Springs is a speck on a map in farming country, middle Nebraska in a sea of corn fields. When she and Kogi have too much energy, tearing through the house chasing each other, her parents send her outside to help in the garden. After that afternoon in school, she takes pleasure in getting her hands and arms as dirty as she can, defiant. She'll show _them_ dirt.

It's not that she's never noticed everyone else around her looks different. Her parents have been honest that she's adopted, that they chose her because they love her. She is very aware that both of her parents and her three older brothers all have light hair and grey-blue eyes that look like storm clouds in the summer.

She supposes this is balanced out by her hair and eyes as dark as the soil, because nothing can grow without it _or_ the rain.

 

* * *

 

She reaches a detente with the girls in her class by ignoring them studiously—and it isn't hard, there are only three of them. The boys care less that she's the trees and the earth instead of the sun and the sky, and she prefers to play rough anyway. Kogi is not one for gentle shapes or slow transitions, all sharp in tooth and claw. (For a month and a half when they're ten, there's a craze amongst the girls school-wide for daemons shaped like miniature unicorns lifted directly from Lisa Frank stationery; Maggie and Kogi could not disapprove more. He stays a full-sized tiger the whole time. She gets detention for scaring her English teacher. They both agree it was worth it.)

So it maybe isn't a huge surprise when, at 14, as they're all on the bus to the high school in Wymore and she's sitting with the boys toward the back, that they start to talk—again—about jerking off and girls. If any of them even remember Maggie is a girl, they don't let it bother them, but she kind of thinks they just don't remember. She doesn't mind. It's better than them asking her which boy she likes.

 

* * *

 

(Years later, Maggie will reminisce fondly about her first crush, and how it was _obviously_ a crush even if she couldn't wrap her gently sheltered head around it, but in the moment it goes like this:)

Maggie learns how to be friends with a girl for the first time her junior year of high school. Caroline is the right kind of nerdy to appreciate Maggie's comic book references, and she talks about moving to a big city like Gotham or National City after they graduate (for college, for potentially meeting one of these superheros who have come to light over the past few years, ripped from the comics) with the hushed reverence of a true believer. They're both in marching band, and it's only sensible for Maggie to sometimes stay over at her place after a football game has kept them out late.

Maggie is enthralled. (Kogi attempts disdain, but he's won over by Caroline's housecat-daemon, a big orange tabby who perfectly matches her hair.)

They're laying on Caroline's bed together, the credits playing for some teen movie Maggie hadn't fully paid attention to or cared about, when Caroline flops dramatically sideways and lays across Maggie's lap.

"How _come_ ," she whines, "Jason hasn't asked me to prom yet?"

Maggie runs her fingers through Caroline's hair, smoothing it away from her forehead. "Maybe you should ask _him_ if you want to go so much." Caroline rolls her eyes, snorting. "Hey, for real. Like, if you want to date him then just talk to the dude. He's a dumb brick, but he's not _that_ dumb." Kogi jumps up onto the bed, laying against Maggie's thigh, his side against Caroline's shoulder and upper arm. It makes Maggie feel warm, almost giddy, this casual touch. Maybe this is why girls were friends in the first place; it's certainly not anything she'd have considered with any of her other friends. Emboldened, a little bit flushed, she continues, "I mean, _I'd_ go with you to prom if you wanted. So you don't have to go alone."

Caroline stiffens, expression shifting in a way Maggie doesn't quite understand, and she sits up, away from Maggie and Kogi. "I...don't think that'd be a good idea. People might think we were lesbians or something." All the warmth has drained out of Maggie. She laughs defensively.

"What? No. _No_. As _friends_."

She doesn't spend the night at Caroline's again.

 

* * *

 

There are a lot of girls between Caroline and her cat-daemon and the next time Maggie and Kogi deliberately touch someone else, almost all of them out and, if not proud about their sexualities, at least interested in Maggie enough to be worth the chance.

There's a trope in TV and movies she kind of hates: two people fall in love and don't speak about it and then they touch each other's daemons and they just _know_. Kogi thinks it's demeaning to the daemons. Maggie doesn't think it's even true. So they just _don't_ touch anyone else. It's a point of friction with some of her girlfriends, including the breakup that sends her to National City for a fresh start, because it's a normal part of intimacy. (Apparently.)

She throws herself into her work, and it goes like this:

They're in the middle of negotiation with a hostile alien, the kind of "negotiation" that Maggie expects to go sideways at any minute. It's Maggie, Kogi with teeth bared behind her, and a handful of DEO agents who'd arrived like they own the whole city and tried to kick her out of her own damn crime scene. One of them, a brunette who is _usually_ smirking when they run into each other, is standing within arm's reach of her, looking up at the sky for _something_. Her expression is open, afraid, and it makes Maggie's heart pound.

There's a whoosh of black as something small and feathered--her daemon?--swoops down to land on the DEO agent's shoulder. As he does, the tip of his wing clips Maggie's cheek, and in that moment she feels an electric kind of warmth that spreads, branching along her trigeminal nerve to settle in the base of her skull, lingering long after the fraction of a second's contact. She looks over at the agent, and over her shoulder Maggie watches Supergirl set down to fight.

A creaking, metallic noise catches their attention simultaneously, which Maggie only has time to register as a car being thrown directly at them before the agent takes her hand and _pulls_.


End file.
